How to Cook Like a Man Read Online Free PDF

lost pregnancy, and weirdly exuberant relief, as if I’d gotten a death sentence commuted by God. But then I saw Liz walking down the crummy sidewalk all dressed in white, with her black hair shining and her eyes all red as she hugged herself and cried openly and hurried up our shitty, rotting steps to rush in the front door before the neighbors saw. She went straight into the living room, threw herself onto our bed, wept some more, and told me she felt certain she’d never bear children, and that her teenaged anorexia had somehow ruined everything. She now wanted nothing more in the universe than to be a mother and couldn’t possibly wait another second without losing her mind.
    Two months later, and now a serious crackerjack with that tomato technique, I managed to feign excitement when Liz got pregnant yet again, though less so over the surprising new emotional imperative she felt toward yet another elective responsibility of the kind I’d always eschewed: Liz needed a puppy, she told me, right away, so that she’d have something to love throughout this pregnancy, regardless of what happened to the baby.
    â€œNow wait,” I said, “hold on, this is an emotional time, but is that really a great idea? Because, I mean, I’m going to flip the first time I have to skip surfing to walk a dog.”
    Liz dropped eight hundred bucks—far more than I could’ve gotten for my pickup—on an English setter puppy, a dog so comically cute it looked like a Disney creation, all black-and-white and silky smooth, with long soft hair and floppy ears and big floppy feet. She named the dog Sylvie, and as Liz’s belly began toswell, we walked Sylvie together in the park atop Bernal Hill. It happened to be late winter just then, a time of year resembling spring in other parts of North America: grass greening up from the rains, a few poppies and other wildflowers appearing tiny on the steep slopes, and little white butterflies driving our bird-dog puppy crazy. Liz and I would stop on our walks to chat about which showing of which new-release movie we ought to catch that night. Then we’d gaze out over San Francisco’s sweeping-flat Mission District. Off to the left, pastel homes swept up the green hillsides of Twin Peaks, where my mother had grown up. Dead ahead, due north, we could see the downtown office towers where my grandfather had been a lawyer. We could see the gunmetal gray of the Bay Bridge, too, arcing eastward into Berkeley. But mostly that view was about airy impermanence, for me, all the old wooden houses, rising and falling on the undulating San Francisco landscape like windblown sea foam on the swells, lifting into a sky equally changeable, by the day and the hour, with the constant coming and going of the white fog banks, blowing past our hill in bits and pieces.
    Socializing tends to fall off as the pregnant lady grows increasingly fatigued. Falafel and burritos become unattractive to the pregnant lady’s palate. Pancakes migrate from the breakfast menu to lunch and even dinner. Movie rentals displace theatergoing, for the increased comfort of the pregnant lady’s own couch, and also for the greater access to ice cream. But even here, a book like
Vegetables
can’t quite get a man’s attention, given that nostalgia for his lost life-about-town pushes non-pancake food conversation in the direction of, say, “Sweetheart? If I could ever figure out how to make a vegetarian kung pao like we used to order at Eric’s on Church back when we ever, ever went out to dinner, do you think you’d be interested?”
    Nora Ephron, screenwriter of the classic romantic comedy
When Harry Met Sally
and of the movie adaption of
Julie & Julia
, Julie Powell’s memoir of cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
, has admitted that, after she got married, she “entered into a series of absolutely pathological culinary